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Iwata pledges to keep Revolution software prices down

Software prices for Nintendo's Revolution console will buck the trend of next-generation titles being priced more expensively than their current-gen counterparts, with Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata expecting to keep prices below $50.

Software prices for Nintendo's Revolution console will buck
the trend of next-generation titles being priced more
expensively than their current-gen counterparts, with
Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata expecting to keep prices below
$50.

Although Nintendo can only directly control the prices of its
first-party titles, it's those games which are likely to set
the pricing benchmark for the system - and Iwata told
CNN/Money in a new interview that he "cannot imagine any
first party title could be priced for more than $50."

That's well below the $60 price points being mooted by many
publishers for next-generation software, which has already
been seen on some Xbox 360 titles - a pricing strategy of
which Iwata is openly critical.

"In the US, we're going to see the next generation cost an
awful lot," he told CNN. "I really don't think that there's
going to be a lot of acceptance by current customers of the
$60 price tag. They may allow that for a limited number of
premium titles, but not all."

While Nintendo's resistance to price inflation is unlikely to
endear it to the publishers currently pushing for the
industry's baseline software price to rise, Iwata's stance is
at least partially justified by the company's commitment to
keeping development costs down - with the Revolution being
cited as by far the cheapest next-gen system to create titles
for, thanks to mature hardware and development tools enabled
by a specification only a few times more powerful than
existing platforms.